izigame.me

This one was hard to review negatively.
Unfortunately, the more I played it, the more I realized the game just wasn't cutting it for me.
I will try to refrain from making obvious comparisons to Persona 5 and other ATLUS games as I think the game deserves to be judged on it's own merit. Much love to the developers either way, since various interviews have showcased that they are truly passionate about this project.
PROS
- The setting and core plot ideas are amazing. While we all know most gamers don't want politics in games, I think medival fantasy is a great setting to write political intrigue as it just tends to give birth to spectacle.
- Very likable cast of characters when looked as individuals, despite a clear lack of chemistry between them.
- Some of the best bonding scenes across both Persona and other games with similiar mechanics.
- The villian is fun to watch despite clearly being painted as a bad guy who we are not meant to sympathize with.
- Significant lack of "anime" moments. No sexual harassment gags, no squeaky mascot character and no romancing of every female character under the sun.
- Harder difficulties are actually challanging and fun without being overly grindy.
- Proper MP management in dungeons is very real and core part of the gameplay.
- No random encounters. Being overleveled lets you one-hit kill mobs.
- The calendar system works really well with the road trip mechanic.
- Way easier now to tell how close you are to maxing out a social stat.
- No more need to guess what a character wants you to tell them for a significant gameplay advantage.
CONS
- The badly made job system.
The other main reason I bought this game simply because it used the job system. I find that most if not all of my favorite RPG's use some manner of this system. It is such a ripe ground for creativity giving rise to some fantastic gameplay in games such as Bravely Default, Crystal Project and Final Fantasy 5.
Even Etrian Odyssey, a game made by Atlus with a way more restrictive job system feels more fluid and interesting than whathever the goal of this was. While I said I would refrain from comparisons, it really feels like they tried to shoehorn in systems from Persona that really just don't work well when paired with a job system. Shin Megami Tensei games were always about the quick and rapid adapting to whathever you are currently facing, while this feels like neither that nor a more deep system.
The game could have just had one big skill tree and it would have been functionally the same.
- Oversimplified jobs that don't make use of their simplicity.
Most jobs I wouldn't pick because "Hey this seems like it would work well with this other job" but because
"Hey I need to hit this weakness for this upcoming boss". And just when the game was starting to feel like it is opening up for proper creativity of the player, it start locking you in by giving you character exclusive jobs and skewing stats so far for one character in one thing that it feels like you are doing yourself a disservice if you are trying a different strategy from the intended one. Barring a few exceptions, most of the jobs don't have interesting gameplay goals individually, other than just "Hey I hit fire weakness".
The job "upgrades" are equally lame, with the sword master and cleric taking the top spot in that regard. Nothing wrong with such a simple system, but once again the game doesn't feel like it does anything fun with its simplicity either.
- Questionable UI
I don't necessarily dislike most of the menus, there are some great quality of life stuff such as being able to see which followers want to talk to you and if you have any available quests with just a few button presses.
Being able to see if the enemy has any stealable items on them is also great.
However the way you change jobs and most importantly how you change the inherited skills for each job drove me absolutely mad. I am all for style but surely there was a way to not make me have to hover with my left stick over nodes to learn a new skill. The navigation itself is not hard, you get pretty familiar with where everything is pretty quickly, but it just doesn't feel snappy enough. It actively discouraged me from experimenting with other jobs. The job nodes could have also been expressed in more interesting ways other than vague icons you can barely read on smaller resolutions.
- Lack of interesting activities
To move on from the job system nitpicks, the scope of activities you can do outside of combat is very minimal. Almost all non dungeon activities serve the purpose of increasing your social stats, which are then used to level up your follower. However, with the smaller follower cast this also meant that the majority of your time you ARE just picking social stat options, and once you max those out there is not much to do other than do some small start increasing activities. The followers mechanic could have been scrapped alongside the calendar system to allow the story room to breathe for more subtle character development and interesting interactions. Urgency can be done without a calendar system, you just have to try a little harder.
- Party members
This one boggles my mind. Without trying to spoil much, I understand that some people join you party pretty late into the story for plot reasons. However, pairing this with a job system that requires long term planning and decision making really doesn't mesh well. You are left with half the cast having mastered 10+ jobs while the new character has just mastered their first. The game also gives you an incentive to use the new characters in your battle party as benched characters do not get the full EXP unless you are near to maxing out their follower rank beforehand. Once again a case of it feeling like the gameplay was a secondary thought to the story.
A smaller nitpick but it feels like Eupha didn't even need to be part of the story. Her character development during her dungeon feels weird and forced, and she ultimately has no reason to follow the main cast around. Which is weird because that same part of the story could have been used perfectly to add in the last party member into the story.
- Dungeons and uh... Dragons ?
This was the last straw for me. I have played plenty of games where all the dungeons boiled down to simple corridors, It's not a huge dealbreaker usually, but here however, this kind of lazy development feels even worse. The game goes out of its way to give you plethora of optional dungeons that sound really interesting when told by an NPC... Only to find out it is a copy paste of the same dungeon a while back.
Other than the rare "human" monsters, the majority of monsters are also uninspired. Goblins, dogs, moths, skeletons, wasps and plants recolored 50 times over. Credit where credit is due, they at least try to make them stand out gameplay wise with various conditionals to how their AI behaves. This actually brought the fun of the system back a little bit to me and I genuinely wish to see more of that in future games. All in all, if they weren't going to put any effort into the dungeons, I would have wished it WAS randomly generated so that it at least could be different for every player.
In the end, when I stepped into another optional uninspired corridor dungeon, with 10 mob spawners placed just to pad out the gameplay, I realized that the combat really wasn't the focus of this game and that nothing was driving me to continue it.
Conclusion
Unfortunately the game falls just short in all aspects to such a degree that the small annoyances turn into big ones, ultimately making me dislike it overall and dropping it about 70% into the story.
The developers clearly put love into the setting of the game, but I can not say the same for the gameplay itself which feels like it was an afterthought.